Martin Scorsese (2013)

There are moments when Martin Scorsese seems to be aiming for something similar to what Bob Fosse achieved in Cabaret – making the audience feel, and be tempted by, the fetid energy of the culture that he’s also critiquing.  But the characters in The Wolf of Wall Street, adapted by Terence Winter from the real-life New York stock swindler Jordan Belfort’s memoir of the same name, are neither ambiguous nor interesting so the effect is very different.  Scorsese has been criticised for revelling in the violently hedonistic (sometimes just violent) behaviour that he describes.  You wouldn’t want him to adopt a condemnatory tone towards it for three hours yet it’s hard to argue with the aforementioned criticism because he doesn’t seem to have anything much to say – other than what Jordan Belfort has to say.   Jordan (Leonardo DiCaprio) keeps popping up with narration to camera and – perhaps partly because of Scorsese’s continuing love affair with his lead actor – his presence and point of view dominate, or at least fuse with, Scorsese’s.  Two of the strongest sequences in The Wolf of Wall Street – they’re absorbing partly because their mood and tempo is very different from the film’s prevailing hectic register – take place on Jordan’s yacht and in a seminar room in Auckland University, New Zealand.  In the first of these sequences, Jordan is interviewed by Patrick Denham, an FBI man who’s investigating his business dealings at Stratton Oakmont, the company Jordan set up and has made a fortune through:  there’s a real tension in who has the upper hand in the tight, well-written exchange between them but Jordan scores a hit when he tells Denham he knows the cop once had hopes of a Wall Street career himself.   The seminar in Auckland is the setting for the film’s final scene and introduces Belfort’s career as a motivational speaker since his release from prison in 2006.  (He served twenty-two months for securities fraud and money laundering.)  The mostly young men in his Kiwi audience look dull and dim; when Jordan hands a pen to one then another of those in the front row and asks them to sell it to him, they fail ineptly.  But their whey faces nevertheless express a wimpy longing for what Jordan has to offer.  Both these sequences suggest that everyone really wants a part of this kind of action – that only hypocrites would claim, or fools think or feel, otherwise.  The international commercial success of The Wolf of Wall Street must be due in no small part to Scorsese and Terence Winter tapping into this but I’m a fool.  Just about every example of the life that Jordan and his kind enjoyed was horrifying to me.

Scorsese must have realised that he could make a movie the look and rhythms of which would correlate with the speed – the drugs and the get-rich-quick ethos – of the world of Jordan Belfort.  It looks as if the excitement of realising this, and the stimulus of staging the various and elaborate scenes of debauchery and abuse, took over.   Scorsese also expects the audience to be magnetised by Leonardo DiCaprio.  This film is by some way their most successful work together (with the potential exception of Gangs of New York, which I’ve not seen through).  And DiCaprio’s acting here is the best I’ve seen from him since What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?  For a while in The Wolf of Wall Street, I thought he was liberated by playing someone outrageous – liberated from trying to create a nuanced, conflicted character, which he’s often tried and failed to do (The Aviator, Revolutionary Road, Shutter Island, J Edgar and so on).  But then I realised there must be more to it than that:  DiCaprio played a more thoroughly vile man in Django Unchained and still seemed lightweight.  In Tarantino’s film, however, he was up against the likes of Christophe Waltz and Samuel L Jackson.  Scorsese makes it much easier for DiCaprio to dominate here:  there’s some good work in supporting roles, especially from Kyle Chandler as the FBI man, but, with the sort-of (and peculiar) exception of Jonah Hill, as Jordan’s pal and colleague Donnie Azoff, there’s no one to challenge the star’s charisma, on Wall Street anyway.  The other men whom the camera spends time on are either strikingly bad-looking or have been cast for their anonymity.  It’s interesting when Jordan goes to Switzerland (so that he can stash millions there) and DiCaprio confronts Jean Dujardin, in a witty cameo as a corrupt banker.  For the few moments that DiCaprio has to share the screen with another good-looking male star, the dynamic shifts.

Scorsese directs Leonardo DiCaprio skilfully, recognising that Jordan is too dominant a role for the man to be powerfully nasty for three hours:  DiCaprio’s essentially likeable presence and the hard work that he has to put in to be shocking mean that Jordan isn’t as oppressive as he would otherwise be (even if it also means that, like everyone else in the movie except for the FBI man, he isn’t of any interest either).  And it wouldn’t be fair to understate how much better than usual DiCaprio is.  There’s a physical dynamism and definition of movement and gesture that gives him an unexpected authority.  His voice sometimes has a roughness that gives it a richer quality than before.  Jordan often behaves like an angry little boy and this comes easily to an actor who’s struggled in other roles to seem grown-up.  When Jordan is under pressure, though, as in the exchange with the FBI man, there’s a sustained edge to DiCaprio that I’ve never seen previously.  Scorsese stages the rabble-rousing sequences at the Stratton Oakmost offices very well.  DiCaprio (although with evident effort) gets a rhythm going and he’s helped by what the people playing Jordan’s staff are doing:  the manic esprit de corps of the brokers fuses with actors feeding off each other’s energies.

Much of the bacchanalia, whether in the office or the bedroom, has a kinetic charge:  Scorsese’s evident delight in realising these sequences meshes with the characters living in the moment.  There’s an excellent choice of songs on the soundtrack – the throb of the music goes with the sex on display, and the sexual drives of Jordan and co merge with their other propelling lusts.  Although The Wolf of Wall Street is way too long for what it is (it’s hardly a richly complex epic of corruption even though it’s the same length as The Godfather), there are some clever changes of pace and tone.   The sequences describing what happens when Jordan is out of his head with his favourite Quaaludes go on forever but, just when you feel the sex and drugs and parties are going to be the whole movie, Scorsese will cut to something more quiet or exuberantly, broadly comic – as when Rob Reiner, as Jordan’s accountant father, is enraged by a phone call interrupting a favourite TV programme (but speaks in a hyper-polite English accent when he actually answers the phone).  The cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto is vivid, the editing by Thelma Schoonmaker very sharp – although there’s an unbelievable glitch when Jordan, at the end of a bout of love-making, begins a line with his trousers visibly off and, just by sitting up on the bed, ends it with them on.

Jonah Hill gives another taking performance:  Donnie Azoff has the hyperactive astonishment of a man who can’t believe he’s living the life he’s living.  Hill has a fine moment when Donnie tells Jordan how he loves being stoned and really means it.  Scorsese tends to display the numerous naked women in the movie but it’s the shaving of a girl’s head, in a piece of macho office bravado on her part, that’s more worrying.  The more significant female roles have been cast shrewdly enough to catch you off balance.  There’s a glazed vacancy in the looks of Margot Robbie, who plays Jordan’s second wife Naomi, so that the character’s feistiness then comes as a surprise.   For a British audience anyway, having Joanna Lumley in the role of Naomi’s aunt is a bit distracting although she plays it well enough.  The actresses doing battleaxe authority women are good too, even if the casting of them because of their looks – like all the unprepossessing men – is offensive.  But Scorsese shows again a remarkable ability to get actors in small parts to express their character fully without overdoing it.   The Wolf of Wall Street is evidence that he can still make a technically exciting movie (it’s the first he’s shot digitally rather than on film).  You just wish he’d had a more worthwhile subject.

18 January 2014